Scientific American thinks you are stupid: The dissection of a blatant propaganda piece for global warming alarmism.

Scientific American Magazine published an absolute farce of an article defending the scientists involved in the “climategate” scandal. Leaked emails and documents prove that an international cabal of the “global warming elite” rigged the data to show man-made global warming and conspire against other scientists who generated datasets through true scientific methods that challenged them. This cabal has received tens of millions in grant money for their alarmism. The piece from Scientific American is a testament to the degree of dishonesty and self-delusion academics, journalists, college administrators and ideologues are willing to go; all while making it sound so reasonable.

This piece from Scientific American is a textbook example of first-rate “attitude change propaganda”. What is attitude change propaganda? Attitude change propaganda is the most modern and common form of propaganda and is practiced regularly by the elite media culture. It takes place when the media presents you with half-truths and strategic gaps in the information provided. The information that is provided is presented with an attitude, or particular tone that is designed to create a false narrative in the reader’s mind that is directionally different from the facts in context. Since the false narrative is usually implied or leads the readers there through suggestion and gaps in key information, it is easier to deny when called out on it.

With all the “hot air” surrounding climate change discussions, none has been hotter in recent weeks than that spewed over a trove of stolen e-mails and computer code from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England. Longstanding contrarians, such as Sen. James Inhofe (R–Okla.), who famously dubbed climate change a “hoax” in a 2003 speech, has pointed to the stolen e-mails as information that overturns the scientific evidence for global warming and called on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to halt any development of regulation of greenhouse gases pending his investigation into the e-mails. And recent polls have found that fewer Americans today than just two years ago believe that greenhouse gases will cause average temperatures to increase—a drop from 71 percent to 51 percent.

North Pole Sea ice WAS dwindling and then shot up 28.7% the year after the date on their “sea ice continues to dwindle” link. When sea ice goes up 28.7% and keeps going that is not continuing to dwindle and Scientific American knows that. Their writer is lying to you straight up. They also fail to mention that if this is “global” warming why is the south pole getting colder and did not have the same issues there? Greenland used to be green and now it is covered by a glacier, what did man do to cause the warming that made it green hundreds of years ago and then cause the cooling to have it covered in glaciers?

The “last decade being the warmest on record” link they provide is yet another deception. It was a study done for the purpose of trying to refute satellite and weather balloon data showing the cooling trend over the last 10 years, so the study did not have the goal of providing a comprehensive and accurate result, rather it had the purpose of achieving a specific result. The study which reported that we have seen more warming in the last 10 years was based largely on NOAA Ground Stations. Stations that are routinely placed on asphalt parking lots, on stone structures, next to the heat pumps of buildings, next to barbeque grills, next to chimney’s, surrounded by black tires etc; all of which give the result of higher temperatures. You can see pictures of some of these ground stations in our coverage of this very story HERE. You can also see in our coverage how the rigged raw data still wasn’t giving them the warming trend result they wanted so they just adjusted it, much like was done in the CRU scandal.

The CRU scientists leaked emails admit that they can’t explain the cooling trend over the last decade while publicly claiming that temperatures are still rising.

Again Scientific American is aware of all of this as the data showing it was posted. They are also aware that ground warming isn’t global warming and Arctic Sea Ice changes aren’t global warming any more than Antarctic temperature drops are global cooling.

Their link about the “concentration of greenhouse gases” is also misleading. CO2 is a tiny fraction of all greenhouse gases. It accounts for a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the greenhouse effect and manmade CO2, while going up, is a tiny fraction of the previous tiny fractions. The decay of plant life that dies is responsible for far more CO2 than man’s activities. Notice that the article does not mention the most prominent of all greenhouse gasses, water vapor.

So why are they not asking the question, if man-made CO2 is up over the last decade why the global cooling trend? More on that later – Editor]

Nor has the fundamental physics of the greenhouse effect changed: CO2 in the atmosphere continues to trap heat that would otherwise slip into space, as was established by Irish scientist John Tyndall in 1859. “There is a natural greenhouse effect, that’s what keeps the planet livable,” noted climate modeller Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) during a Friday conference call with reporters organized by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “Without it, we’d be 33 degrees Celsius colder than we are. That’s been known for hundreds of years.”

He added: “We’re getting up to the point where the total amount of forcing from these greenhouse gases is equivalent to the sun brightening about one percent. That’s a very big number indeed.”

[What they didn’t tell you:

They tell you that heat is being trapped at the greenhouse layer because of more man-made CO2 and Methane. If that is so then it would be easy to measure the heat changes at and just below the greenhouse layer with satellites and balloon instruments, but those methods are made fun of and minimized by the alarmist (LINK see CBS story at the link) because much of that data just doesn’t show the warming that want to see (LINK – LINK). For the reasons stated above as well the alarmists prefer the rigged ground station data. – Editor]

In fact, nothing in the stolen e-mails or computer code undermines in any way the scientific consensus—which exists among scientific publications as well as scientists—that climate change is happening and humans are the cause. “There is a robust consensus that humans are altering the atmosphere and warming the planet,” said meteorologist Michael Mann of The Pennsylvania State University, who also participated in the conference call and was among the scientists whose e-mails have been leaked. “Further increases in greenhouse gases will lead to increasingly greater disruption.”

[What they didn’t tell you:

What ever “consensus” there is or was, was based largely on what we now know is deliberately manipulated data from the CRU in England and other involved people caught in the fudging such as the aforementioned Michael Mann. That consensus is dwindling fast because the IPCC scientists are now (according to a BBC report) turning on each other as most of the data the IPCC used was from this very same cabal of corrupt people who have now been caught conspiring via email to destroy much of the raw data in case of Freedom of Information laws were used on them.

The “scientists” at East Anglia CRU carried out that plan as much of the raw data that was used to push the global warming agenda is now destroyed (LINK). Now that much of the key data is destroyed; they started claiming that they are releasing everything. A smart propaganda move as the elite media will say “see they released everything they had”, but most will not report that most of the key data is now gone forever and what is being released is just what is left (LINK). The UK Telegraph says that this is the worst scientific disaster of our generation (LINK).

By the way, isn’t it rather odd that Scientific American is using as a source one of the very men at the heart of this scandal who is now fighting to keep his career, his credibility and his millions in grant money? Does anyone else find this strangely self-serving? Michael Mann has been in trouble before. His famous “hockey stick” computer model that “proved” man-made global warming was shown to be a fraud. When others punched in different data or random data the results were the same hockey stick graph showing global warming.

As far as the consensus, here is a LINK to 450 peer-reviewed articles written by global warming alarmism skeptics, or shall we say true scientists. So the truth is that there isn’t much of a truly scientifically based consensus at all. There is certainly a politically motivated consensus among leftists academics. There was even dissent among IPCC authors of the original UN global warming report (LINK). – Editor]

Some of the kerfuffle rests on a misreading of the e-mails’ wording. For example, the word “trick” in one message, which has been cited as evidence that a conspiracy is afoot, is actually being used to describe a mathematical approach to reconciling observed temperatures with stand-in data inferred from tree ring measurements.

[What they didn’t tell you:

This is where Scientific American gets desperate and really starts to treat you as if you are stupid….. a misreading of the wording they say… OK how about you just go read some of these emails and documents for yourself (LINK) and you tell me if this is just people taking things out of context. Even the National Association of Scholars, which has never taken a position on the global warming issue, is shocked by these documents (LINK) stating that the scientists involved had a “bad faith agenda” went on to say:

The discovery that numerous scientists at CRU have distorted data, misled the public, and behaved in numerous ways counter to principles of academic and scientific integrity must be weighed very seriously.

Broadly speaking, this scandal will alter the burden of proof. From this point on, proponents of global warming theory will receive no benefit of the doubt. Wanton extrapolations, reliance on models in which data can be endlessly readjusted to fit the thesis, and attempts to stigmatize critics as scientifically illiterate will have to stop. Ad hominem attacks on critics suggesting that they are in the hire of “big oil” or other interests will be seen for the shabby evasions they always were.

– Editor]

The scientists on the conference call, including atmospheric scientist Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, also addressed other parts of the content of the stolen e-mails, including some that griped about particular journals (Climate Research) or editors (at Geophysical Research Letters). “It’s important to understand what peer review really is,” Mann noted. “It’s not a license for anybody to publish.”

[What they didn’t tell you:

Here we are quoting Michael Mann again. No one said that peer review was a “license for anyone to publish”, and that is a complete and obviously deliberate misreading of what the emails were saying about how this cabal of scientists made clear that they would manipulate, bully and undermine the peer-reviewed process. Their own emails and documents show this effort clearly.

The more frantically they talked up “peer review” as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: “How To Forge A Consensus.” Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s “peer review,” climate-style.

– Editor]

As for charges that the CRU database is corrupt or compromised such that its results cannot be trusted, Schmidt noted that a number of other databases with climate records supporting global warming exist throughout the world—including NASA’s GISS, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and even the IPCC, all of which provide access to the raw data. Further, many of the same contrarians arguing that global warming has stopped in recent years are relying on the same CRU record that they are now disparaging as untrustworthy.

[What they didn’t tell you:

This paragraph really takes the cake. NASA and NOAA use the same ground stations that we showed are placed so as to create extra warming (remember on chimneys (new LINK), on black asphalt parking lots etc), so the raw data from those sources is so uncontrolled that it is rendered laughable.

Most of the IPCC data is not original raw data. Remember that much of the IPCC data was from CRU and this cabal of scientists. These same scientists who have now acted on their plan to destroy much of the original raw data. If that raw data was on duplicate at the UN why conspire to destroy data that everyone can get their hands on?

With that said NASA/NOAA/NCDC (all US Government) and even the embattled CRU did have available some raw data sets that showed that global warming alarmist skeptics are correct. We know they had that data because they admitted that they had it and tried to hide it from the public, but some of it has gotten out from time to time.

This piece of raw data came from the CRU and shows the cooling trend of the last decade (LINK). That link also tells of the harassment and death threats that scientists who don’t participate in global warming alarmism have to face (More death threats HERE). This is a raw dataset from the NCDC showing the cooling trend as well (LINK).

The cabal or conspiracy do pull off such a hoax does not end with the CRU, Micheal Mann, John Holdren and crew. A leaked document from the UN (LINK to article and documents) shows that the UN the entire man-made global warming myth and resulting hysteria is all a scheme to redistribute wealth under the pretense of saving the planet.

The climate research center in New Zealand is now facing their own “adjusted data” scandal (LINK).

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was caught via Freedom of Information laws of hiding data and reports that the claims of global warming skeptics are largely true (LINK). This includes emails and such discussing the effort to hide the data.

It isn’t just this field either, money and grant chasing have resulted in a massive plagiarism/ buying opinion scandal at numerous medical schools and journals (LINK).

Just how badly has our academic system become corrupt? If I had a couple of billion dollars to spend and I started handing out fat grants to research the possible evolutionary existence and eventual extinction of unicorns and after a time I lowered and stopped grants to those who dismissed the idea and increased the grants to those who wrote of its possibility, soon I would see papers that “presented evidence” of their previous existence. After a number of years we would see peer-reviewed published evidence of the previous existence of unicorns.

The Black Swan Fallacy and how many scientists get drawn into it.

In science very little is ever proven per se, things are ruled out. If I were to hypothesize that all swans are white, because I have never seen a black one or a brown one, as an ethical scientist I would mount a global search for the swan that is not white.

This is not what global warming alarmist scientists do. They are looking for and counting only white swans. They seek to lock out any indicators of black and brown swans. These global warming alarmists have largely ignored the sun, cosmic rays and other factors when it comes to global warming/cooling and blamed it on man. They try to avoid inconvenient questions like how it was that man effected the glacial and interglacial periods, caused the medieval warming period, the Maunder Minimum, etc.

Rex Murphy of the CBC comments “Let us not hear that the science is settled…Science has gone to bed with advocacy”

– Editor]

UPDATE – The commenters on the Scientific American web site are tearing that awful article apart quite ably. It is a site to see. Here is a statement from one commenter:

This article did not address a single aspect of climategate. It hopes that the reader is so stupid as to believe that “trick” means something else that non-scientists can’t comprehend. We all know what a trick is. You don’t have to be a scientist to know when you are being lied to. If tree ring data was unreliable since 1960, why would it be reliable before 1960. The article ignores that “peer review” was redefined. Explain that one away, will you. Or how these “scientists” were going to beat up someone who disagreed with them. Very mature; very scientific. There was a consensus 30 years ago that there was “global cooling” by much more respected scientists like Carl Sagan that turned out to be false. Science is not supposed to be a religion. It is not based on faith or hope. Global Warming has become a cult, not a science. Nowhere is this more evident than in how the mainstream media have ignored this story for 2 weeks and how Scientists have resorted to the worst form of defensive group think.

Doomedsaid

“It’s important to understand what peer review really is,” Mann noted. “It’s not a license for anybody to publish.”

This of course is the most telling. Academia has always been this smug little group who is managed in ways that only the Knights Templar could only be jealous of. Their thuggery and mockery of anyone outside their “peer” circle are most usually discredited, their work uniformly rejected and the only way one gets to publish is if they go with the prevailing agenda that is set forth by this group of academia “Templars”

Michael Mann’s work has been debunked and yet he seems to be the Grand Poohbah of the AGW movement.

The scientific community has finally done themselves in with the global warming scam. There are millions who never believed in global
warming,especially when you look at who was driving it. Al Gore couldn’t even carry his own state during his presidential run in 2000.
It was obvious he was just the puppet. When you have environmentalists claiming to care about trees, yet willing to abort babies,
create crazy new laws like “hate crime legislation” you know these people are lunatics!!! The ivy league elite of Yale, Harvard,
etc. have lost credibility as you look at who they have turned out politically. When someone now says they graduated from the ivy
league colleges the comment has become “oh i’m sorry to hear that”? This is something you would normally hear if there had been a death
in your family, or other tragedies; however these ivy leaguers are destroying america bit by bit.

America will survive this tyranny because Americans love our country, and want to protect future generations and our constitution.
Although you will not see it on most government run news media outlets, Americans no longer trust politicans as a whole, news media,
or the new laws being shoved through that are not constitutional. Going against the U.S.Constitution is not acceptable and our
forefathers had the brilliance to prevent exactly what is happening now. If anyone does not like America and our Constitution
then the millions of us say “get out of America”! If you like European Socialism then move to Europe and leave America alone.

As for the lying environmentalists that push Global Warming Propaganda just to make zillions like Al Gore, they should all be
jailed for fraud, high crimes, and treason.

The millions of us out here are “free thinkers” and are not your sheep that will believe you. Just the opposite!!

[…] New media is also interactive. When a post is put on a web site often there is a place for comments, but even more effective are bloggers who can take news stories , do research and refute them, argue with them and share their thoughts and arguments with others. As an example of this interactivity I provide one of my pieces that deconstructed what was a fine example of attitude change propaganda in Scientific American magazine and got a great many hits – LINK. […]